Creating Africa in America. Jacqueline Copeland-Carson
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CWC was a mediating institution—a space that brought together African people across various class, ethnic, and political divides to experiment with a particular approach to building pluralistic ethnocultural identities. So, this research does not so much study up as study across the diverse African ethnicities that comprise part of the CWC’s constituent base. It examines how the CWC, particularly its predominantly middle-class African and African American and female leadership, worked across the Twin Cities’ power and ethnic structure (and national boundaries) to promote a shared sense of African community.
It became evident from the earliest phases of the research that the term “African” was a key issue for debate among the CWC’s African and African American constituency. To emphasize participant self-definitions of identity, the term “African” is often used in quotes in this study to underscore the culturally contentious and contextual meanings of the term. In describing various events and conversations in the course of fieldwork, there is also a deliberate effort to use ethnic classificatory terms that the participants themselves use, with explanation where necessary. So, for example, the reader will find, in some instances, the term “African born in America” used by many CWC participants to refer to what some people might describe as “African American” or “Black American.” Another term, “continental African,” is used by African Americans, who define themselves as “African” or “Africans born in America” to refer to a person of African heritage born in Africa but living outside Africa, in this case, in the United States.
The use of the self-defined ethnic terms gives a truer sense of the internal dynamics of identity formation than forcing CWC participant labels into those that I might personally prefer or that are more common in academic discourse. Indeed, the terms themselves are part of what is being posited and debated as various CWC participants create a shared sense of “African culture” among people of diverse origins and backgrounds. By the end of Part II, the tenor of CWC identity formation terminology is established, and I generally discard the quotation marks around the term “African,” although I continue to use self-identified ethnic labels with explanation where necessary.
Ideally, an anthropological study of any transnational cultural formation, including a diaspora, would involve “multi-site ethnography” (Marcus 1995)—in this study, ethnography in the various places in which the CWC’s work was somehow manifest. Unfortunately, such a geographically wide-ranging ethnography was not feasible in the context of this study. An alternative strategy that I used for this study was to track the perceptions, life histories, and social relations of key agents involved in the creation and maintenance of transnational networks as they live and work in a given translocal site. With increased global mobility and cultural interchange, networks—and not places—may provide an important part of the social glue that holds “community” and other collectivities together (Sullivan 1996). Thus, I saw the CWC as a key point of connection—a linking mechanism—in a larger and more complex transnational flow of meaning, images, and symbols connecting various people to places in the African diaspora. Although based in one place, the CWC represented and shed light on a cross section of the micro- and macro-level sociopolitical factors that impact African diasporan identity formation in the Twin Cities and in networks beyond them.12 This strategy, while providing for an intense study of the CWC’s African diasporan networks, does have its limitations as a transnational ethnography. The findings do not provide for definitive generalizations about African and African American relations in either the Twin Cities or the United States. Instead the study is a point of departure to contribute to anthropology’s efforts to define the contemporary theoretical and methodological grounds of intercontinental cultural production.
The field research for this study was carried out in an applied setting. Although relatively new and small, the CWC was an innovative, high-profile nonprofit funded by several large foundations as part of an effort to promote new approaches to addressing the increasing concentration of poverty in the Twin Cities urban neighborhoods and the disproportionately high levels of physical health problems, for example, diabetes, high blood pressure, and high infant mortality rates, in these areas.13 Because of its deliberate and planned efforts to promote a pan-African sense of identity and social relations among Twin Cities’ Africans and African Americans, the CWC was an ideal forum for studying translocal cultural processes. Since the research was in an applied setting and was not a foundation- or government-sponsored evaluation, the CWC was not required to participate in this study. Furthermore, the CWC’s staff and board of directors were committed to a “participatory research policy.” As explained to me, the CWC would only engage in research projects where the benefits to its work were clear, CWC constituents were in some way included in research design, and the researcher “helped out” in setting up meetings or taking minutes and was able to apply what she or he learned to his or her own personal growth and health. The participatory and applied research setting provided unique access to CWC’s culture-building work. Participants’ reactions and my personal reactions to the sometimes unexpected implications of a participatory research strategy are included in the study as ethnographic data and are fundamental to understanding the CWC’s identity formation process.
Key CWC staff and volunteers were involved in every phase of the research design and implementation. The overall research design as presented here was negotiated to ensure that the goals and methods complemented the CWC’s interests and philosophy of working with the community. CWC staff and participants reviewed and commented on interview guides, suggesting questions they thought might better address the study’s key issues. Periodic research reports were provided to the CWC executive director and medical director and to health and wellness committee representatives. I held regular briefings with key CWC African staff, and reported on my general interpretations (while maintaining a confidentiality policy) about what I was learning in various CWC contexts, sessions, committee meetings, and so forth. These briefings provided regular opportunities for me to enrich the study by including participant reactions to my interpretations as research data.
As has been noted by several anthropologists, participatory research has its own set of unique challenges and opportunities. These were compounded here by the dual expectations in the CWC’s participatory research policy that participants be involved in the research design and that I make efforts to apply my research to my personal life. Many of the ensuing challenges and opportunities could not have been anticipated because they emerged as the fieldwork evolved. Situations occurred in which I had to set boundaries about the nature and extent of my participation in a specific context to maintain the always (at some level) sociopolitical balance between “insider” and “outsider” perspectives. I established some practical participatory research rules. For example, while I would occasionally take meeting minutes or volunteer to make reminder calls to participants about meetings, I reached an understanding with the CWC leadership that I would not act as a CWC staff person, promote a particular point of view, or encourage a participant to take a particular action. Also, we eventually agreed that while this study would include CWC participant perspectives on African diasporan identity, it could not promote or advocate particular participants’ points of view. Staff members understood that my role as an anthropologist was not to reduce these views to one perspective, for example, that of the CWC leadership, but to put together the broader story of CWC African identity formation from the feedback of participants of various ethnic backgrounds, social positions, and opinions. The resulting study is my interpretation of these processes. It is not in any way an evaluation or social impact assessment of the effectiveness of the CWC’s work. In many instances, certain situations and their resolution enriched my understanding of the divergent perspectives among the CWC’s participants and are included in this study.
There was a mutually beneficial convergence of interests between the academic goals of my research and the CWC’s activist agenda. The CWC staff was interested in learning how one could document, describe, and explain the effort to define and build community in tangible terms. Given the CWC’s pluralistic constituent base and mission of creating community out of diversity through health care, the complementarity with theoretical interests in anthropology was not surprising. Groups like the CWC are close to the pulse of contemporary translocal cultural dynamics. Yet it is difficult to describe such “soft” community development approaches to funders and practitioners